And Now For A UMPC That's Completely Different
E-Lead, a Taiwanese maker of automotive "infotainment" systems, showed up at the Lunch@Piero's event at CES Tuesday with an <a href="http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=Ultra%2DMobilePC" target="_blank">ultra-mobile PC</a> that doesn't look or work like any PC you've ever seen.
E-Lead, a Taiwanese maker of automotive "infotainment" systems, showed up at the Lunch@Piero's event at CES Tuesday with an ultra-mobile PC that doesn't look or work like any PC you've ever seen.The device, demonstrated by E-Lead vice-president Mark Su, is the same general size and shape of other UMPCs, a form factor dictated by their almost universal reliance on 7-inch touchscreen displays. But the E-Lead device has a keyboard unlike anything I've ever seen before.
The surface that would normally be covered by individual keys is split between two touch-sensitive pads that function both as touchpads for cursor control and as keys designed to be used most effectively with your thumbs, like a BlackBerry, rather than touchtyped on.
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It's not a not a standard keyboard, either -- there's no left shift key, for example.
The color screen swivels and folds flat like a tablet PC, and the display includes a mode that ghosts the keyboard over the screen content, so you can operate the device while it is almost completely closed by slipping your thumbs under the slightly open lid -- the touchpads locate your finger positions and display the corresponding key characters.
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Details were scanty. Su said the device runs on a VIA processor and chipset, includes a 30GB hard drive, WiFi and Bluetooth. It weighs about 1 3/4 pounds. Su said his company expects to start producing the device by the beginning of the second quarter.
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